‘You’re going to have to get up, you know.’
I roll over and pull the pillow over my head to block out the rough Scottish accent rudely invading my sleep. ‘Go away,’ I grumble. ‘Please just let me—’
‘No! You don’t understand – we need you to man the bar. I am driving Gabriela to the hospital. She is having… what’s the word in English? Pushes.’
I haul myself on to my elbow and frown at Ray uncomprehendingly.
‘Contractions! Yes, that’s the word. She is having contractions. The baby is coming!’
I almost fall out of the bed in my haste to pull a jumper over my head and gather up the clothes I’d left strewn across the floor last night. I haven’t even seen Gabriela yet. I was let in last night by a half-awake Ray who took one look at my shocked, tear-stained face and gave me a room key, a towel and a long, cigarette-scented hug before going back to bed again. I dimly remember crawling under one of the classic Casa Hamaca brightly coloured blankets and shivering myself to sleep, images of Harry and Nicholas swirling before my eyes until they merged into one twisted, mutated figure that haunted my dreams.
Ray is practically bouncing on the spot with impatience. ‘Please, Kirsty, we need you to help downstairs – it is already full for lunchtime. And we cannot close today, it is nearly time for Fiestas de Quito – the big Independence Day party next weekend!’ Ray bounces a little on the spot in panic.
Lunchtime?
I grab my phone and see that it’s nearly midday. There are two missed calls from Sebastian and sixteen from Harry. I ignore all of them, pull some shoes on and follow Ray downstairs.
‘Barry will be here in an hour,’ he says over his shoulder, leading me at a trot down the wooden spiral staircase to the hotel reception. ‘He knows the ropes. And the kitchen staff will help you. We just need you to keep things running until then.’ Gaining momentum as he reaches the bottom of the stairs, Ray sweeps through reception and into the bar and restaurant, me trotting to keep pace with him.
‘Menus, cutlery, glasses, mugs.’ He sweeps an arm in the general direction of some shelves. ‘This is the till. This button to open, just type in each amount manually, and if anyone wants to pay by credit card tell them to bugger off until mañana. Tell them there is a management emergency.’ Ray stops and runs his hands through his hair, and I glimpse the wild, terrified eyes of a man about to be cannon-balled into fatherhood.
I cast a nervous glance around the half-full restaurant, then rest my hands on his arms. ‘Leave it with me. Don’t worry. Everything will be fine… give Gabriela my love, and please phone as soon as there is any news.’ Ray stares back at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Now go – go! Get to the hospital.’
I have to push Ray towards the door and watch him almost trip over his untied shoelaces as he unlocks the car, where Gabriela is already waiting in the passenger seat, her head in her hands bowed low over her knees. I wave them off then turn to the task in hand.
The next two hours are spent relentlessly collecting plates of fish and chips and sandwiches from the hatch in the kitchen, printing off bills, taking money, and cursing Ray’s antiquated till as the drawer either refuses to shut or slams closed on my fingers. Throwing myself gratefully into the work, I squash the confusing hangover of emotions firmly down inside me and put on a welcoming smile. I don’t even notice when Barry arrives, but at some point realise the queue of food on the hatch has decreased and look over to spot the thick-set, silent man I recognise from my first night at Casa Hamaca, wordlessly depositing a platter of empanadas on a table at the back. He looks up, nods at me, then goes back to the kitchen hatch.
At some point the lunchtime rush dies down and I manage to escape back to my room to have a shower and change, wondering that none of the hotel guests or visitors has commented on the fact I served them their lunchtime panini with my faded hoodie on inside out. Just stepping back into the bedroom and taking in the chaos of discarded clothes brings back the events of last night with a wrench. Nicholas’s face swims before my eyes, its every detail so similar to Harry’s… the face I had loved for so many years.
Had loved.
And now, it turned out, the face that had lied openly to me so many times. Feeling a cloying nausea start to spread through me, I hastily get ready and run back downstairs and into the fray.
Barry collars me at the bottom of the wooden staircase. ‘Ray called. Says no news yet, he reckons it’s going to be a long night. He said they’ve just given Gabriela an epi…’ He trails off helplessly.
‘An epidural?’
‘Yeah. Think so. He said it’s fine for us to close up early. So last orders in two hours, okay?’
A mutiny threatens when we ring the last orders bell. Rowdy groups of locals and tourists alike have already started to break off into groups and begin loud, enthusiastic games of ‘forty’, a traditional card game that Barry explains to me is always played in the lead-up to the annual Independence Day festival in Quito.
‘Couldn’t Gabriela have held on until after the festival next weekend?’ he grumbles, tipping a smashed glass into the bin next to me and rolling his eyes at the cries of ‘Viva Quito!’ and ‘Long live Quito!’ from all around us.
I would have quite happily continued working until late, finding a strange comfort in the noise, the hectic back and forth and the friendly anonymity of serving drinks to a room full of people you will never see again. Anything better than going back up to my room alone, left at the mercy of my thoughts and the questions churning painfully through my mind… the greatest of all being what next?
But I help Barry shepherd people gradually towards the door, letting him handle the more boisterous ones and field the drunken objections with a stern ‘Landlady’s having a baby, all right? Now ‘op it!’
We wearily gather the last glasses from the tables and stack them along the bar in a queue for the dishwasher. Almost as soon as the last punter leaves I notice Barry’s eyes sliding towards the door as he shifts from foot to foot.
‘Get going, if you want,’ I say as casually as possible, feeling suddenly and unexpectedly desperate to be alone. ‘I’ll finish clearing up here.’
‘Would you mind?’ He turns to beam at me. ‘The missus has given me another chance… so I should be getting home, really don’t want to cock it up this time.’
I wave him off and lean back against the bar for a moment, watching as Barry saunters out into the night, breaking into a whistle as he heads home to his wife.
Tiredness suddenly overwhelming me, I peel myself away from the bar and lock the door behind him, then switch off the old stereo system at the wall, kick my shoes off and turn back to the pile of dirty glasses.
Then I hear the knock on the window.
I turn around slowly, already knowing it is Harry seconds before seeing his face pressed anxiously to the glass, pale against the gloomy street outside.
In a twisted perversion of that Ross and Rachel scene, the one that shaped a whole generation’s romantic expectations, I walk slowly to the door and slide back the lock, my eyes never leaving Harry’s. But instead of falling into his arms, I step backwards quickly holding my hands up.
‘I’ll listen to what you have to say, but that doesn’t mean…’
Harry doesn’t even hear me. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you! Your phone goes to voicemail, Ray and Gabriela aren’t answering, Liza doesn’t get back from visiting her brother until tomorrow…’ The words come out all in a rush. It occurs to me that he looks slightly deranged, one side of his hair standing up on end and his eyes bloodshot.
‘Ray and Gabriela went to hospital,’ I say flatly. ‘The baby’s coming.’
Harry doesn’t even seem to register this fact and turns back to me, wild-eyed. ‘I just want to talk to you. Explain things. I can’t believe you just ran away like that last night!’ His voice rises a pitch as he stares at me accusingly. ‘You didn’t even let me—’
‘Okay, Harry. Talk.’ I fold my arms and lean back against the bar.
He stops pacing and stares at me.
‘Go on, talk,’ I say again. A strange sense of calm, of inevitability, is slowly spreading through me. It makes me feel a little sick, as if knowing that whatever Harry can say to me will only take us one step closer to our inescapable end. But even as my stomach churns and my heart starts pounding faster, I keep my arms folded and my eyes fixed firmly on his.
‘Talk, Harry. Say what you have to say.’ Finally, after all this time.
Harry runs his hands through his hair and glances at me one more time, as if hardly believing me, then slumps down into one of the bar chairs with a long sigh.
‘You have no idea what I’ve been going through, Kirst. For such a long time.’ He keeps his eyes fixed on the floor now, his voice low, shoulders slumped. ‘Can you imagine what it’s like to get an email one day, telling you that you have a son? One single email that can turn everything you thought you knew about your life upside down. I thought life had no more surprises for me – I’d done the travelling, had the adventures, been to uni, built up my career… I thought I knew what path my life was on. I was resigned to it. Then that email arrived…’
A bad taste has started seeping into my mouth. ‘Resigned?’
‘Yeah,’ Harry looks up at me earnestly. ‘You know. We’re at that age, aren’t we? I know you want to have kids. And fair enough. I mean, it’s what people do, isn’t it?’
I look at Harry, his blue eyes staring back at me totally absent of guile, and something clicks into place. Harry’s parents – the textbook marriage, the model home, the privately funded education and clearly mapped-out career path. He’s never known anything different. His life had only ever had one planned trajectory. It’s not something he wanted, not in the way I do. Or did. It’s just the ‘done thing’, another step up the ladder for him, devoid of emotion or excitement. I realise I’m shivering.
‘Then that email arrived, the news that simultaneously tore my world apart and gave me something to live for, to get excited about. For a while it totally consumed me. I stopped painting. I could barely concentrate at work. I stopped being… the same… with you. I know you noticed, Kirst.’ He hangs his head. ‘I tried to forget it and carry on as normal, so many times, but it was no good. I just had to know, I had to find Nicholas.’
Something to get excited about. The words stay ringing in my ears even as Harry gets to his feet again and starts walking agitatedly back across the room.
‘I felt so guilty, too.’ His voice cracks then. ‘How could I be thinking about starting a family with you, doing the right thing and being a responsible adult, when I had a son on the other side of the world who didn’t even know me?’ He turns round and paces back towards me, his eyes pleading with me to understand. ‘Can’t you see I just had to meet him, to find out, before I could move on to the next level with you?’
There it is again. ‘The next level.’ I’m transported back to the night Harry asked me to go travelling with him, the way he had implored and beseeched me to consider his idea, his promise that afterwards we would ‘level up’ or whatever other video-gaming analogy he had used to allude to having a family. As if it were my reward for going along with his crazy mission. His lies. Anger courses through me, caustic and boiling, the anger I have held back from Harry ever since we got to Ecuador, perhaps before.
‘But you fucking LIED to me!’ I yell. ‘All the way through. You lied and lied and lied. You made it sounds like we were going on this cool adventure, you convinced me to take a sabbatical from my bloody job, you sold the idea to me… I started getting all excited about going TRAVELLING, then we get here and – what happens?’ My voice is getting higher and higher and my legs start to shake. ‘You seem to forget all the plans we had, all the places we were going to see, you get a job and refuse to leave Quito. Then you have the nerve to try to convince me that I’m the one going mad – the weird phone calls, waiting until I go out to use Skype, disappearing into town on your own – then telling me I’m the one being paranoid because I’ve been spending too much time with PRISONERS!’ Tears are pouring down my face now, and through them I can just make out Harry staring at me with what looks like a mixture of amazement and outright terror. ‘And speaking of the prison,’ I sniff, ‘do you know what I think is ironic? In just two visits to a prison I met people who are more honest and trustworthy than the man I was sleeping next to every night! The person I was supposed to have a future with.’ I turn away from Harry and lean against the bar, burying my face in my hands, letting all the anger and frustration flow out in noisy wet sobs.
Harry hovers behind me, placing one hand on my shoulder, then taking it away again. Finally, he holds out one of the table napkins and tries to press it into my hand.
‘Babe, please don’t—’
‘Oh, just let me cry for a moment, can you do that?’ I wave him away, feeling slightly mad. Distraught, relieved, and weirdly on the brink of hysterical laughter. ‘Don’t you think I deserve just to have a fucking good cry?’
He backs away again, sitting down, looking at the floor.
I blow my nose messily into the tissue and swipe it over my eyes, glimpsing the wildness of my reflection in the window behind Harry’s head, and really not caring. Tears still brim over my eyes and cloy my voice as I sit down in the chair next to Harry. I can feel him glance at me nervously, waiting for me to speak.
‘The thing you don’t seem to have realised, Harry, is… I would have understood.’ I keep my eyes fixed on the window, watching the mottled shapes and flickering lights of the street outside. ‘If you had confided in me from the start, talked to me, told me about Nicholas… for goodness’ sake, we bought a house together! Do you trust me so little?’ Harry tries to speak, but I hold up my hand, knowing somewhere deep inside that I owe it to both of us to say this, whatever happens next. ‘If you had only told me the truth… I would have found a way to support you, whatever you decided to do. We could have moved on from it.’
Harry looks up from the floor to stare at me. ‘But you wanted your own kids so much… surely it would have torn you up? Would you have forgiven me?’
‘Forgiven you a mistake? No – not even a mistake – an accident, something you didn’t know about, that happened years before we even met? Yes, of course.’ As I say the words out loud I realise for myself their undoubted truth, the answer to the question I have been asking myself over and over during the last twenty-our hours. If Harry had simply told me about Nicholas from the beginning, sat me down one evening, after receiving Lorena’s earth-shattering email, to tell me the truth… instead of cheating me into following him on a madcap journey to Ecuador… of course I would have stayed with him. Even if that meant things between us would always be a little bit worse.
As I realise this, a new feeling starts to swell inside me. Rising up past the anger and betrayal and sadness, is an unmistakable feeling of relief. I remember the certainty, the conviction I had felt when I told my father in the jungle that things weren’t the same between Harry and me. Even before knowing his secret. Before understanding the extent of his lies and betrayal.
A series of memories rears up before my eyes – Harry, rolling over and turning out the bedside light, not even letting me finish reading out the part of the guidebook I wanted to share with him. Quashing my excitement, dismissing my plans. Harry, criticising my interest in the prison and my desire to help Naomi. Harry and his endless string of excuses not to spend time with me, not to make an effort with my father, not to be a couple.
My mum’s time-old lecture rings in my ears, the one about sticking together through everything, about working at a relationship, about not becoming my father. I’d spent so much time listening to that, I’d stopped listening to myself. Stopped seeing what was right in front of me.
‘Listen, Kirsty, you have to understand,’ Harry continues, fidgeting and running his hands through his hair in anguish. ‘I just didn’t know what to do… I knew you wanted more from our relationship. You wanted a bigger commitment, plans… kids. I kept telling myself I was ready to give those things to you, but… every time, something just made me freak out.’ He grimaces and buries his head in his hands. ‘It’s so pathetic, I know. But I’d grown up in this… this… suburban normality. Marriage, house, kids. And I always felt there had to be more to life, something more exciting out there.’ Harry keeps staring at the carpet, tears streaking his face, oblivious to the expression of distaste I can feel spreading across mine.
‘Then I found out about Nicholas. As I said, it turned my world upside down… if I’m honest, Kirsty, it breathed life into me again. It gave me something to strive for. I became obsessed. All I could think about was planning how and when I would meet him. That meant deceiving you, and for that I’m… I’m so sorry. And now I’m here, I’ve done it, all I feel is… even more empty and lost than before.’
At some point during his speech I realise I’m not really listening any more, but am searching Harry’s face for any vestiges of the man I once fell in love with. The man who I couldn’t believe asked me out at university. Who laid out a carpet picnic with candles the first day we moved into our new house, making me giddy with happiness even though we had no furniture or money or cutlery. Who smiled back at me from halfway up a hillside in Devon, hair blowing everywhere and eyes full of love, as I took his picture.
The face beside me now is the same. The messy, sandy-blond hair and greyish blue eyes, apart from a few more crinkles around the edges, are all the same.
But looking at him tonight, I feel absolutely nothing. Closely following the nothing is a creeping, profound sadness that all I felt before has gone. Then, behind even that, a new, unfamiliar feeling of… freedom.
‘Listen…’ Harry speaks again, his voice fainter. ‘Is there any way we can move past this… you can forgive me?’ With vague dismay I notice tears spilling out of the corners and oozing fatly on to his cheeks. ‘Because… you’re all I know, Kirsty. And I really don’t want to lose you.’
He frowns down at the stained pub carpet as if this realisation has only just come to him.
I take a deep breath and prepare myself to say the words that have been swelling, gaining momentum inside me for days now.
‘Actually… you already have.’
He lifts his gaze from the floor and stares at me in horror.
‘What do you mean?’
I release the breath, an unexpected feeling of peace filling me.
‘I mean, I was going to break up with you anyway.’ I stop, and let the words sink in – my own ears tingling in disbelief at their boldness. Harry gawps at me, his mouth opening and closing unattractively.
‘But – surely you can’t mean—’
‘Yes, I had already decided to break up with you even before I met Nicholas.’ The voice speaking does not sound like my own. It sounds better, firmer, more confident. ‘All you achieved yesterday by revealing your secret was… giving me closure.’
‘But – Kirst – wait! How can you… how can you be so…?’ Harry flails for the right words, casting his eyes wildly around the bar as if they will be found inside the coffee machine or behind the rum and vodka optics.
I stare back at him coolly. ‘There was no sabbatical, was there?’
Harry gapes at me, his mouth still slightly open, perhaps wondering why I am choosing to fixate on this particular detail of the entire mess we are in. Even now, he doesn’t understand.
‘From your job at the Academy? You didn’t take a sabbatical. Did you?’
He takes several moments to answer, and when he does, he’s staring at the carpet again. ‘They said I could reapply next year. They promised they would consider my application favourably.’
Silence falls between us, expanding to fill the room and make the space between us seem larger.
‘Harry?’
‘Yes?’
‘I think you should leave now.’